Each year, there are two dates in my calendar that can't be ignored, which I use as flags in my process to build Impilo:

• St-Swithin day, July 15th, which also correspond to the yearly major update of the EMBOSS suite;
• 15 September, which more or less the beginning of my Fall trimester teaching cycle at the Université de Montréal, where I teach applied bioinformatics.

These two dates allow me to create a building cycle which has the following steps:

• Around May 1st, I create a new virtual machine using the latest Ubuntu LTS version. On this machine, I will install and test the desktop environment and non-bioinformatics applications.
• On June 1st, more or less, I gather all the applications that are to be installed in the next distribution.
• On July 15th, I download the latest EMBOSS suite and I start on building and installing the applications as well as updating the documentation related to the installation process.
• Around August 15th, I distribute the next version to my fellow trainers to detect and squash the inevitable bugs.
• After finishing the bug hunt, I create a new VirtualBox appliance and I build a LiveCD usingremastersys, all ready for September 15th.

— Sylvain Foisy 2010/06/24 21:10